


clean up that blood all over your paws

by beardsley



Category: Captain America (Movies)
Genre: M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-05-26
Updated: 2014-05-26
Packaged: 2018-01-26 14:35:47
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings, Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,674
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1691831
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/beardsley/pseuds/beardsley
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>His dog tags identify him as Barnes, James B. It takes a frankly embarrassing amount of time for him to remember that name without stumbling over it inside his own head.</p><p>‘But you go by Bucky,’ says the man who calls himself Steve.</p>
            </blockquote>





	clean up that blood all over your paws

**Author's Note:**

  * For [caughtinanocean](https://archiveofourown.org/users/caughtinanocean/gifts).



> This is for [caughtinanocean](http://archiveofourown.org/users/caughtinanocean), a lovely wonderful person and truly spectacular writer who I'm lucky to have as a friend. Happy birthday. ♡
> 
> And because this became an issue recently: **this is not a happy sunshine story**. Its working title was 'sad domestic mindfuck'. While no specific archive warnings may apply here, keep an eye out for general awfulness, miserable amnesia tropes, brief but graphic violence and a distinct lack of magic fix-its at the end.

Memory comes and goes. It’s normal, they tell him. He had an accident, they tell him.

His dog tags identify him as _Barnes, James B_. It takes a frankly embarrassing amount of time for him to remember that name without stumbling over it inside his own head.

‘But you go by Bucky,’ says the man who calls himself Steve. It takes an embarrassing amount of time for — for Bucky to remember his name, too. The third man with them, Sam, makes a habit of introducing himself every morning when he knocks on the door to Bucky’s bedroom to get him out of bed for breakfast: ‘Hey, Bucky. It’s me, it’s Sam. Rise and shine.’

Bucky concludes, from the dog tags being there at all, that he is or was in the army. He figures that’s where he got into the accident. Maybe it was even something heroic, and not just a fuckup. He doesn’t ask too many questions, though he’s sure Steve would answer any questions he had. He’s sure of it with a bone-deep certainty that he concludes must mean he and Steve really are friends and no one is punking him.

He’s sure, it’s just that —

~

There are things he doesn’t wonder about.

~

He dreams in black and white and shades of grey, and the dreams he has are pretty awful.

~

So he has big gaping holes in his memory; big deal.

The first memory he has, the first one he’s aware of without prompting and with no confirmation from either Sam or Steve as to if it’s true, is of sitting in the backseat of a car with his legs stretched out and his hands in the pockets of an oversized hooded sweatshirt.

The first words he remembers hearing are, ‘You’re gonna love it in San Francisco,’ spoken by Steve from behind the wheel. He remembers the song played on the radio, upbeat and forgettable and bland. He remembers Steve watching him in the rearview mirror and Sam in the passenger-side seat with one knee pulled up to his chest, one foot propped up on the dashboard.

He has big gaping holes in his memory, but these two don’t need to know just how big. What they don’t know can’t hurt them, can it? Bucky is good at reading people, he finds; he’s good at responding to cues. He thinks it might be a little like the way sick dogs will hide their injuries, though he has no idea where he takes the comparison from.

~

Steve drags home a second-hand television set and they watch a hockey game, the three of them, on a couch that is too small to seat them all comfortably so Steve, rolling his eyes but in good humour, slides down to sit on the floor between Bucky’s thighs with his back to the couch.

They watch the game in companionable silence and after some time, Bucky reaches out to run his fingers through Steve’s hair. For a second Steve freezes, then relaxes into it — he relaxes into the touch, and tips his head back like an indulgent cat hungry for affection. It makes Bucky smile.

While Steve was away for a work thing for the whole day, Bucky and Sam spent the afternoon fixing a crack in the plaster in the hallway. Bucky isn’t sure, but he thinks it was already there when they moved in; or maybe it was Steve and Sam when they were bringing in furniture. There is still some white paint on Bucky’s wrists, but it has dried. He scratches his nails along Steve’s hairline and listens to his soft, content hum.

Steve is handsome. He moves with unselfconscious ease, though Bucky — he’s good at reading people; he’s good at responding to cues — has noticed that when he forgets himself sometimes, or when he’s very tired, he hunches his shoulders like he’s trying to make himself smaller. (Like being smaller would make him more comfortable.)

The room is warm and the TV is a pleasant background noise, the only light is coming in from the small kitchen and the street outside, Sam is dozing on the couch next to Bucky, and Bucky keeps running his fingers through Steve’s hair. Eventually Steve rests his head against his thigh, and Bucky imagines him with eyes half-shut. Steve’s eyes are very blue. It’s a little eerie.

They’re friends. It feels like they always have been; it feels like a constant, fixed point in time and space.

~

It’s raining, though it’s not too cold. Bucky has no clue if that’s typical for this time of year, but he enjoys it. The hum of water is calming and comforting, an unchanging white noise, and he comes out on the fire escape to smoke. Usually he does it in the bathroom or leaning out of the kitchen window; Sam doesn’t like the smell, and Bucky doesn’t blame him. It’s a rotten habit. He should probably quit.

He sits with his knees pulled up to his chest, back against the brick wall, and tugs the hood of his — Steve’s — sweatshirt low over his eyes.

It takes four tries before the lighter works. Bucky inhales nicotine, exhales smoke, and watches the street below. These are the things he doesn’t wonder about: how much it costs to live in a three-bedroom apartment in San Francisco, and what Steve means when he says Bucky’s part of the rent is covered by an Uncle Nick, and why he felt a cold stab of sheer _panic_ earlier when he found a black leather glove in a drawer in the living room.

‘Thought I’d find you here.’

Bucky tips his head up to peer at Steve, climbing out through the window to join him on the fire escape.

‘You know me,’ says Bucky, watching Steve settle next to him. His hair is sort of a mess. He must have been in the shower, or out running. Something like that. ‘All about the poetry and dramatic things like sitting out alone in the rain and contemplating the — shit, I dunno. Philosophy.’

Steve huffs a laugh, small and quiet. ‘You ain’t wrong about the dramatic part.’

‘Oh, shut up.’

‘What d’you want for dinner?’ Steve asks. He turns to Bucky at the same time Bucky turns to him, and after a brief pause he reaches up to tug the hood of Bucky’s sweatshirt (his own sweatshirt) down and off and his hand lingers at the back of Bucky’s neck for just a second.

Bucky brings the cigarette up to his lips, thinking. ‘Don’t really care,’ he decides. He — isn’t sure, but he does think he can remember that Sam likes Chinese food, so maybe they’ll end up getting that.

He offers the cigarette to Steve. Steve takes it and inhales, and breathes out smoke, and his eyes don’t leave Bucky’s face for even a moment. Each time they talk it feels like they’re having two different conversations: the one Bucky hears, and the one Steve has with the ghost living in Bucky’s bones who knows all of their in-jokes and history and sometimes it makes Bucky angry, but most times it just makes him pathetically grateful.

Steve is handsome. His eyes are very blue.

Slowly, Bucky takes the cigarette from Steve and holds it between his fingers and slowly, he traces Steve’s lower lip with his thumb and slowly, he leans in to press his mouth to Steve’s.

They both taste like smoke and they both smell like rain. Bucky cups Steve’s face with his right hand, the one he has the cigarette in, and Steve doesn’t wait a single fraction of a second before he starts to kiss back. He kisses Bucky like he might scream if Bucky ever let him go.

~

Bucky concludes, from the dog tags being there at all, that he is or was in the army. He knows that dog tags are also used by people with medical conditions, like diabetes, but he’s fairly confident he doesn’t have diabetes.

He concludes that he is or was in the army, from the dog tags and from his really awful dreams.

~

The plaster cracks with a hollow sound like bones snapping, like a gunshot heard from very far away, but his head is filled with the buzzing static of white noise and he can barely hear anything at all.

He slams the man into the wall, his hand around the man’s neck. It’s his left hand. He’s left-handed.

The man struggles and he’s tall, but it isn’t difficult to lift him high up enough that he can’t keep his grounding and that is how manual strangulation should be done: eliminate defences and hold on, and hold on, and hold on. With steadily applied pressure on the trachea it never takes longer than three minutes, and the bruising is always a giveaway but the fingers of his left hand have no fingerprints.

He’s wearing a glove. His name is —

His mission is —

He knows how long it takes to strangle a man of over six feet. He has vivid memories of bringing down someone even taller and cracking his skull open with the heel of his boot. There is snow melting at the tip of his tongue and he feels chilled to the bone and the man he is strangling opens his mouth to say something, and his eyes are wide and bright but it isn’t fear; the man isn’t afraid.

Through the static filling the inside of his head like a swarm of insects, he can’t hear a third man approaching with a tranquiliser gun until it’s too late.

~

He has really awful dreams.

One of them, the one that keeps coming back over and over with varying degrees of clarity, is the one on the train. The rattle of it across the tracks sends shivers down his spine, because it sounds like steel grinding over hollow bird bones. It’s late afternoon and Bucky sits next to the window, and the setting sun drenches the car in shades of orange and grey and yellow, all warm.

Sam is seated opposite him, legs stretched out comfortably. They’re alone, the three of them. Their bags are stacked in the overhead compartments.

Steve is lying with his head pillowed on Bucky’s lap, nodding off. Bucky runs his fingers through his hair.

Why does he think of the dream as a bad one?

Because it doesn’t feel like a dream at all. Because he doesn’t know where they’re going and where they’re coming from, can’t place it in time, and because if the dream about the train is not a dream but a memory, then —

Well. In another dream, another recurring one, he cracks a man’s skull open with the heel of his boot.

~

He comes to on his knees on the bathroom floor and his knuckles are bloody and he’s trying to catch his breath. Pieces of broken glass are on the floor around him, the light is on and Steve is holding him and whispering, ‘It’s okay, it’s okay.’

‘Steve —’

‘You had an episode,’ Steve says. He’s rubbing circles against Bucky’s back, his touch hot through the fabric of Bucky’s t-shirt. ‘It’s okay.’

Episode. Bucky has no idea what that is supposed to mean, and says as much. His voice comes out hoarse and shaky; he’s shaking. Hie eyes are dry, though, and he thanks god for small favours. He couldn’t stand it if he was crying, too. It’s bad enough as it is, when he feels small and fragile and young with Steve’s arms around him and Steve’s breath warm on his neck.

‘You probably blacked out for a moment. It’s normal after what you’ve been through, it’s post-traumatic stress. It’s all right now.’

Bucky clings to him; he needs to hear Steve’s heartbeat or at least feel it, so he presses his uninjured hand to the side of Steve’s neck until he can feel the thrum of his pulse under his fingers. It helps. Steve’s heart is going a mile an hour, but it helps. It takes some five minutes before Bucky is ready to let go. He sits back, cringing at the harsh light. There’s red all over the bathroom tiles.

His right hand is a bloody mess. He broke the mirror. He has no memory of doing it.

Steve takes his hand in both of his own, ignoring the way Bucky recoils from the touch. ‘There’s a first aid kit in here somewhere. Let me?’

‘Yeah.’

He watches Steve go through drawers. In a moment he’s back on the floor next to Bucky, with pliers and disinfectant and bandages. Bucky almost doesn’t feel it when Steve takes out the bits of glass from under his skin. It feels familiar, like they’ve done it before, though Bucky can only hope sometimes it isn’t him with his knuckles scraped raw.

Steve wraps his hand but can’t seem to let go. He turns Bucky’s palm and runs his fingers across the inside. When Bucky lifts his eyes to look at his face, there’s something in there he can’t name.

‘Thanks,’ he says, just to break the silence. ‘What would I’ve done without —’

He doesn’t get to finish the quip; Steve grabs him by the back of the neck and pulls him in for a harsh, graceless kiss. Bucky cups his face with his left hand automatically and unthinking, thumb brushing Steve’s jaw. He pauses for a fraction of a second before he kisses Steve back. It’s not very comfortable on the bathroom floor, but Steve must need this.

He doesn’t fall apart, though. He presses his face into the crook of Bucky’s neck and starts muttering apologies, even as he doesn’t loosen the grip he has on Bucky.

‘It’s fine,’ Bucky says. He tips his head back and shuts his eyes and trails small patterns with his thumb over the back of Steve’s neck. ‘Everything’s gonna be fine.’

~

He’s sure with a bone-deep certainty that he and Steve really are friends and probably always have been. You don’t uproot your entire life to move cross-country with a stranger, Bucky reasons, though he’s not sure where they move from; his first memory, the memory in the car, is not something he can position spatially or even, when he wonders about it, at a specific time. It feels liminal and fleeting, but he kind of wants it to be real.

He’s sure of Steve. He wonders about Sam, sometimes. He has a bone-deep certainty that Sam is his friend and a good person, a kind decent guy who helps not out of a sense of obligation but out of genuine compassion, but it doesn’t feel like they’ve been friends all that long. He watches Sam watch him and Steve, and he watches Sam watch just Steve, and gets the impression Sam is his friend as an extension of his friendship with Steve. There are no mementos or photos in the three-bedroom apartment they share.

It’s a nice place, though small. There is one bathroom, and one of the bedrooms is a repurposed study. No balcony, shitty fitted carpet. Not much of a view from any of the windows, but it’s always warm and to Bucky that’s the most important thing.

He doesn’t wonder why he hates the cold. He doesn’t wonder why they have three bedrooms, either, when he and Steve —

~

Memory comes and goes.

These are the things he doesn’t wonder about: if the time he kissed Steve on the fire escape and the time Steve kissed him on a cold bathroom floor were the only times, and what would it mean if they were not; why there are three bedrooms in their apartment, and what Steve does for a living; why the memory of cracking a man’s skull open — the _dream_ of cracking a man’s skull open with the heel of his boot —

What he doesn’t wonder about is —

~

Is this the first time?

~

It’s been two months. He thinks it’s been two months. He’s not —

He thinks it’s been two months when he wakes up from another shitty, violent dream and memory washes over him like a tidal wave high enough to drown, to suffocate, to freeze. In the dark Bucky barely makes it to the bathroom, the only bathroom in the apartment, and then barely manages to drop to his knees and lift the toilet seat before he’s retching and puking his guts out.

These are the things screaming inside his head like rabid animals hungry for attention: the man he beat to death on Secretary Pierce’s orders had a wife and two young daughters and the Winter Soldier garroted the first while the other two watched, then put a bullet through each of the girls’ heads; the train he dreams about was a connecting journey after they had to leave the first apartment, the first —; the reason his dreams feel like memories is because they must be, each and every one of them, but there are more memories than he has dreams and when he was fifteen, he thinks but he’s not sure that he tried teaching Steve to dance; when he was older than any soldier should live to be he thinks, but he’s not sure, that he shot Steve and watched him fall, though maybe he was the one who fell.

Maybe —

There was blood on snow and Bucky thinks, but he’s not sure, that it belonged to —

Every order he’d received and obeyed: to lie back, to take it, to breathe through the pain, to pull the trigger, to tighten his fingers, to maximise collateral, to open his mouth, to leave no witnesses; to kill, to die, to be wiped and rewritten so it could all start again. How many times did it start?

If this isn’t the first time, then — how many times?

His hands are shaking so much he only manages to turn on the tap in the sink on the third try (he has a lighter that works on the fourth try; why? Since when does he smoke?), and he rinses his mouth even though all he can taste is blood and gunpowder and it would take bleach and industrial-strength detergent to wipe the blood from his hands, it would take someone cutting off his hands altogether. He’s running a fever, and then he is just running.

There is a patch of fresh white paint in the hallway on the wall, and the crack in the plaster wasn’t there when they moved in. How many times did they have to replace furniture, repaint walls? How many cracks would Bucky find, if he looked? There is a glove in a drawer in the living room and even the sight of it chills him to the bone, but he puts it on — he puts it on his left hand, and why hasn’t it occurred to him before now that he has no real feeling in his left arm? Did they tell him it’s because of the accident? Did he ask them to tell him —

There are three bedrooms in the apartment, the apartment partly paid for by the man the Winter Soldier was ordered to kill in plain sight in the middle of a street in Washington, DC. One bedroom is a repurposed study. The apartment is silent and Bucky is silent, too, and he moves across the shitty fitted carpet soundlessly like a ghost living in the hollow bones of a relic frozen in time.

There is an army-issue knife Steve keeps hidden, but Bucky knows where he keeps it, and he knows this because Bucky Barnes is good at reading people and the Winter Soldier is good at responding to cues.

Everything is dark and quiet and still: everything is the opposite of what Bucky’s head feels like. He goes into Steve’s bedroom and he locks the door, as softly as he can, and Steve is asleep on his back. The window blinds throw long lines of shadow and moonlight over the bed, and Bucky remembers. He remembers. Memory is trying to claw its way out of his head and his throat and it’s a wonder he’s not screaming his lungs out. The air is heavy and dense as he makes his way across the room.

The only noise outside Bucky’s head, in the real world, is his breathing and Steve’s breathing and then the soft creak of the mattress as Bucky puts one knee on the bed to have better leverage.

It happens fast. Steve wakes up and he’s inhumanly quick, eyes snapping open and hand reaching under his pillow, flash of silver in the moonlight as he lifts the gun, the deafening click of the safety being cocked. Bucky moves on automatic, trying to knock the gun off aim (a part of him yelling, _he wouldn’t hurt you_ , even though in his bones he knows everybody is capable of everything), the knife still in his hand and it’s the left hand.

The fight isn’t a fight. It’s uncoordinated and too-quick. Bucky dodges when Steve tries to make a wild lunge at him, switches grip on the knife to hold it more comfortably, but between them he’s the one going on sheer adrenaline and terror. Steve tackles him, not bothering to check his enhanced strength; they grapple until Steve manages to grab Bucky’s wrist and slam it into the headboard hard enough that the wood cracks.

Bucky doesn’t feel a thing.

‘Drop it,’ Steve growls — pleads — in his ear. ‘It’s me. It’s me. Bucky, drop the knife.’

And then things finally snap into place, like puzzle pieces, all at once; air rushes out of Bucky’s lungs and the fight goes out of him and he forces the fingers of his left hand to unclench, slowly. The knife lands on the pillow next to his head. He can hear himself make a soft, choked noise at the back of his throat, one that dies on his tongue and never makes it out of his mouth.

Steve is straddling his chest, the gun still held steady, but his eyes are wide and they’re both breathing hard and fast. It takes a moment before Bucky can speak.

‘I,’ he starts, then starts again: ‘Steve?’

‘Yeah. It’s me.’

It’s ill-advised, but Bucky reaches out — right hand, the hand that has feeling — to trace Steve’s face with the tips of his fingers. Steve is warm to the touch and he freezes for just a second before relaxing, expression somewhere between relief and mourning and now, at least, Bucky knows what it is Steve mourns. (Who.) He relaxes and tips his head to one side as Bucky slides his hand down his jaw, down his neck. He always — he thinks Steve is starved for it, just to be touched, that’s what he thinks, but maybe it’s always the other way around.

The room is too dark for Bucky to read the way Steve looks at him, and he’s not sure he could even in daytime, but with years and decades of ice and killing scratching at his skull from the inside out all he can do is hook his fingers in the collar of Steve’s t-shirt and pull him down.

‘Bucky —’

‘Make me forget,’ Bucky says on an exhale. Steve has to throw up one hand to support himself and they’re so close Bucky can hear his heartbeat, but it’s still not close enough. ‘Just — I need to forget.’

These are the things he’d like to remember and carry with him always: Steve leaning back only far enough to pull his shirt over his head and throw it over his shoulder, the warmth of Steve’s skin as he peels Bucky out of his clothes, his mouth on Bucky’s neck and collar bone, and the way he cocks the safety back on and throws the gun to the foot of the bed.

These are the things he doesn’t wonder about: if this all should feel familiar, and why Steve doesn’t ask him what he remembers or what he would like to be made to forget.

He rakes his fingers through Steve’s hair and drags him up and knows this can’t be the third time they’ve kissed, much less the first, but it is the first time he’s felt like a real live boy in — a long time, he thinks, but doesn’t want to know how long. Steve kisses him like it’s the first time for him too, and the only time that will ever really count. (Like he might scream if Bucky ever let him go.) There is a point where Bucky impatiently flips them over and straddles Steve’s hips and Steve laughs into his mouth.

It takes everything in Bucky to not focus on the unknowable — is this how they are? Easy and eager and laughing? Is it how they used to be? — and instead go where Steve takes him, and where Steve takes him is apart and to pieces.

What Bucky doesn’t wonder about, as he falls asleep plastered against Steve’s back, is —

~

If memory comes and goes and it’s been two months and the first thing he remembers is being in a car, everything vivid and detailed down to the upbeat and bland and forgettable song playing on the radio, and the first words he remembers are, ‘You’re gonna love it in San Francisco,’ then how many times —

~

How many times does Bucky Barnes ask to be made to forget?

~

The horizon is flat though not lifeless as it rushes past, and Bucky can’t help but register it out of the corner of his eye; he’s hyperaware of his surroundings, as always, and Sam and Steve told him that it’s normal for his brain to still work that way for a while after the accident. The rattle of the train across the train tracks is a little morbid, somehow. It sends shivers down Bucky’s spine when he imagines it must sound like steel grinding over hollow bird bones. It’s late, past six. The setting sun drenches the car in shades of orange and grey and yellow, giving everything a warm glow.

They’re alone, the three of them. Their bags are stacked in the overhead compartments. Bucky sits next to the window with Sam seated opposite, his legs stretched out comfortably. Every once in a while he licks his thumb and flips the page of the book he’s reading, the title in block red letters spelling out _Fahrenheit 451_. Bucky wonders if it’s good; he doesn’t think he ever read it. He’s not sure he’s the book-smart type.

Steve is lying with his head pillowed in Bucky’s lap. The dying sun catches in his hair, bright and soft, and he lets Bucky run his fingers through it with a pleased noise like an overgrown, affectionate puppy. He has one of his hands curled around Bucky’s thigh, fingertips brushing the inseam of Bucky’s jeans.

Somehow, Bucky remembers that Steve’s knuckles used to be scarred; he remembers a spattering of pale freckles across his palms. It’s a little eerie that he doesn’t have them now, but maybe Bucky is just remembering wrong.

After a while Steve shifts around until he’s on his back, looking up at Bucky. His eyes are very blue. He smiles.

‘Think you’re gonna like it in Miami?’ he asks.

Shrugging, Bucky bites his lip as he considers the question. ‘Don’t see what’s not to like. It’s warm, right?’

‘So I’ve heard.’

‘Wonder if I’m ever gonna get warm enough,’ says Bucky. ‘It’s funny, you’d think — shouldn’t I be fed up with heat and crap like that, after the desert?’

He has dog tags that identify him as _Barnes, James B_ and Steve tells him he goes by Bucky, so that’s what Bucky sticks to. He trusts Steve with a bone-deep certainty. He asks few questions, but he’s good at reading people, he’s good at responding to cues. He concludes that he was in the army, and so he must have been stationed somewhere in the Middle East. Steve wears dog tags, too, and so does Sam. Bucky wonders if they served together. He doesn’t ask.

For a split second Steve’s expression freezes, but then he relaxes. He folds his hands over his stomach. He smiles up at Bucky again, easy and fond, and Bucky wonders if he makes Steve happy. He’d like to. Steve smiles, sometimes, like he might.

He says, ‘Hey, it works out for me. Don’t really like the cold either. If you wanted to go to Alaska or North Dakota — buddy, trust me, you’d be on your own.’

~

So he has big gaping holes in his memory.

Big deal.

~

There is a knock on the door and Bucky stirs awake, and for a moment he thinks he’s trapped — then he realises it’s just Steve’s arm thrown over his waist, holding him but not pinning.

‘Rise and shine, fellas,’ comes Sam’s voice. He sounds chirpy and gleeful, and Bucky thinks it must mean it’s very early. Sam likes that neither Steve nor Bucky are much by way of morning people, and when questioned about it he says he takes his laughs where he can. ‘I’m gonna pick up the bookshelf for the study.’

Right, the plan is to repaint the study today and fit it with a new bookshelf so the apartment (two bedrooms, one study, living room, kitchen, bathroom) feels more lived in. The desk is already there and a couple cardboard boxes filled with books and knickknacks are waiting to be put somewhere more fitting, even if it’s just bland IKEA furniture. Bucky knows he probably won’t be much use to the noble effort; he’s still banged up after the accident, bones aching and ugly livid bruises fading over his ribs and back, over his neck.

‘Thanks, Sam,’ Steve calls, still hoarse from sleep. The only response he gets is an amused, ‘Yeah, yeah,’ and then the sound of the front door being opened and closed.

‘Hey,’ says Steve, nosing at the back of Bucky’s neck. ‘You heard the man. Rise and shine.’

Bucky presses his face into the pillow, closing his eyes against the bright Florida sun. Florida, right? That’s where they are? (Why is he not sure?) ‘Make me.’

He can feel Steve sliding his hand lower, and smiles to himself when Steve scratches his fingernails over Bucky’s abdomen. Yeah, Steve knows how to be convincing. He shifts until he’s on his back, pulling Steve on top of him, and moves the leg that got injured more in the accident out of the way. Steve doesn’t settle between his thighs for long. He shimmies down, and down, and kneels between Bucky’s spread legs with a satisfied catlike grin.

Just the way Steve’s eyes are dark and warm is enough that by the time he’s tugging down Bucky’s boxers, Bucky is hard. Steve presses his mouth to each of his hipbones, then below his navel, and again. He presses his smile to Bucky’s skin when Bucky lets out an impatient whine.

‘Magic word?’ he says, leaning back. He has both hands on Bucky’s hips, pinning him in place, and so close to Bucky’s dick Bucky could yell.

‘ _Steve_ —’

It might not be the right word, but it’s enough. Maybe _Steve_ and _please_ are the same, where Bucky is concerned. Steve grins and it makes him look young, young and reckless, and he finally gets one of his hands on Bucky’s dick. His hair falls into his eyes when he bends down again to wrap his mouth around the head and from then on, Bucky forgets about everything other than the immediate reality, barely aware of his own body except for where Steve is touching him.

He’s loud. He’s not sure if he’s loud because he likes it, or because Steve likes it. Maybe both. Sometimes, every morning feels like —

~

There is a knock on the door and he stirs awake, and for a moment he thinks he’s trapped — then he realises it’s just his dog tags tangled uncomfortably around his neck. Light falling in through the drawn curtains catches on the metal when he lifts it to read the name printed there. _Barnes, James B_.

Another knock on the door, and a familiar voice: ‘Hey, Bucky. It’s me, it’s Sam. Rise and shine.’

That would be him. His name is James B. Barnes, but he goes by Bucky. The dog tags must mean he was in the army — he knows, though he’s not sure how, that people with medical conditions like diabetes and things also use them, but he’s fairly confident he doesn’t have diabetes. He was just in an accident, wasn’t he? Probably something related to the army, and he has big gaping holes in his memory. It’s not a big deal.

When he walks out of his bedroom, scratching idly at his stomach and trying to stifle a yawn, he notices a crack in the plaster on the wall in the hallway, and he remembers the three of them were supposed to fix it and paint it over today. He thinks the crack has been there since they moved in, or maybe it was Steve and Sam while they were dragging in furniture.

In the kitchen, Steve is making coffee. He smiles at Bucky when he sees him. His arm is in a sling and there are bruises over his neck, over his collar bone, disappearing under the hem of his t-shirt. When Bucky frowns, he just smiles wider. There’s a healing cut on his lower lip.

He says, ‘Work was insane. I’ll have to go in today. You guys are gonna have to fix the wall on your own.’

‘Oh,’ says Bucky. ‘Yeah, sure. No problem. You okay?’

Steve offers him a mug of coffee. He shrugs. The morning sun catches in his hair, giving it a warm glow. Everything about Steve seems warm; he’s handsome, and his eyes are very blue.

‘I’m fine. You know me, I always stand up.’

~

There are things Bucky doesn’t wonder about and sometimes, every morning feels like the first morning of his life.

**Author's Note:**

> Infinite thanks to [Renne](http://archiveofourown.org/users/Renne) for her help making sure this was semi-coherent, and to [haipollai](http://archiveofourown.org/users/haipollai) for keeping me from devolving into the gratuitous misery porn I originally pitched the fic to her as.
> 
> I also sort of handwaved the big elephant in the room, aka how does Bucky not realise he has a giant fuck off cybernetic arm that makes pretty distinct noises when it's used. Let's just pretend he got an upgraded model that passes for flesh and blood, kind of like in the comics. Let's go with that.
> 
> Written with The Antlers on repeat, specifically [this album](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hospice_\(The_Antlers_album\)), though the title is from "Putting The Dog To Sleep".


End file.
